Why not argue with fools?
Text: Proverbs 12:23
Hosts:
J. Kent Edwards
Vicki Hitzges
Nathan Norman
Narrator: Brian French
The CrossTalk Podcast is a production of CrossTalk Global, equipping biblical communicators, so every culture hears God’s voice. To find out more, or to support the work of this ministry please visit www.crosstalkglobal.org
Produced by Nathan James Norman/Untold Podcast Production
© 2026 CrossTalk Global
Contributors
Keywords
Brian: When I asked AI what were the most powerful forces in the world today, its answer surprised me. It said, and I quote, the most powerful forces in the world today are dominated by the United States, China, and Russia, which hold unmatched military, technological and economic influence. Driven by massive defense budgets and nuclear capabilities, these nations, along with India and emerging European powers like France, shape global security and economic stability. When the world thinks of power, they think of guns, bombs, and armed conflict. But I think this grossly underestimates the power of words, even in geopolitics. It was Winston Churchill who said, you see dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts, there is unspoken, unspeakable fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts, words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse, a little tiny mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. The strongest military dictator can be toppled by words because words are powerful. As Manly hall once said, words are potent weapons for all causes, good or bad. When we speak, our small puffs of air can either promote growth and health or. Or cause ruin and destruction. King Solomon understood this, and that's why both he and I encourage you to join Vicki Hitzges, Kent Edwards, and Nathan Norman as they learn the importance of thinking before speaking in Proverbs, chapter 12, verse 23. Welcome to CrossTalk, a Christian podcast whose goal is for us to encourage each other to not only increase our knowledge of the Bible, but to take the next step beyond information into transformation. Our goal is to bring the Bible to life, into all our lives. I'm Brian French. Today, Dr. Kent Edwards, Vicki Hitzges, and Nathan Norman continue their discussion in the book of Proverbs. If you have a Bible handy, turn to Proverbs, chapter 12, verse 23, as we join their discussion.
Kent: Brian is right when he points out that words can both build up and destroy. Can you guys think of times when you've seen the power of words in action? Have you seen lives change because of words?
Nathan: I'm going to give a fictional example, but if anyone has seen the movie Home Alone, there is a scene in the beginning where the family is there and there's all this chaos, and uncles and aunts and moms and dads are there and all the cousins are running around and Kevin McAllister, the main character, just. He's so angry and he pushes his brother and it causes Everything you get ruined. All the pizza, all the soda is gone. And his uncle says it in this voice, look what you did, you little jerk. Right? Just out of anger. And watching that as an adult now, yeah, I kind of get what the uncle was feeling. And then later on when he's remembering how everyone has treated him poorly in the scene, his parents are all saying terrible things about him, his brother's saying all terrible things about him, and his uncle looks really dark and he says it in this tone. He's like, look what you did, you little jerk. And I remember watching that as a kid and thinking, but that's not how he said that, right? He said it in an exasperated tone in the middle of it. And I never understood it. And I was watching it with my kids a few years back and I realized the reason the filmmaker did it like that, because that's how he internalized it. His uncle yelled at him in a moment of very frustrated exasperation. But this kid internalized those words, that this is who I am. I am nothing but a punk little jerk. What a terrible person I am. And that was like, wow, what an amazing filmmaking decision. But what a power negative words can have on us. It goes right down to the soul.
Vicki: My mother, this is a small example. It just flitted into my mind. But when I first started speaking, I struggled. I thought it was very difficult. And I went and I heard my father. My dad was a great preacher, Haddon Robinson. And I was so discouraged because he was so good. And I told my mother, I'm going to quit, I'm going to quit. I can't do this. I am so not him. And my mother said, stop it, stop it. She said, you have talent. Your father's been doing this 50 years. You've been doing this a couple months. And I went on and I was very successful in my career and I might have given up that night, but she stopped me and it was, you know, in a way it was words
Nathan: and to jump on what your mother was saying. You know, it's been fun in the last, I don't know, four plus years we've known each other as I'll go around the interwebs and I find talks that you've given and guys do that because Vicky is a phenomenal speaker.
Vicki: Oh, that's so nice of you. And see, Nathan's doing it right now.
Kent: I remember when I was graduating from high school and unsure what direction to take, my future mother in law had a conversation with me and she said she'd listened to Some Bible studies I had been giving during the years to a high school youth group. And she said, I think I hear gift. Have you ever thought of going to Bible school? Those words changed my life and never would have come to me any other way. Another really encouraging time was I was Vicki working with your dad had Robinson. And I was there as a scholar in residence for a semester at Gordon Conwell. And at the end, he said that he would like to work with me at Gordon Conwell. And I have rarely had anyone give me such a compliment. And what an honor. I felt that words are powerful. Both of those conversations changed how I saw myself and helped direct ministry. Words are powerful. Winston Churchill is right. When I think of the power of words, I can't help but think of Genesis 1. I see the power of God's words. And by the way, what did his words accomplish? Not the strength of his right arm, just his words.
Vicki: That's a good point. It said, he spoke and the world came into being.
Nathan: Wow. All creation.
Kent: All creation. The universe. And as I've pointed out to people on occasion, none of us has ever created. When you cook, you assemble ingredients. When you build a house, you take wood and cement and wires and whatever else you need, and you put them together, but you didn't actually create a single thing. You just assembled.
Vicki: You combined.
Kent: So we're like kids with Lego blocks. When God speaks, the world is transformed and people are transformed.
Nathan: That's like that joke that science finally gets to the point where they can create life. And so they tell God, we don't need you anymore. We figured out how to create life. And God says, sure, let's have a contest. I'll create, and you create. And so they go, okay. And he says, you can go first. And so they gather up dust. And he says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Get your own dust.
Kent: No. God's words, of course, are most powerful, but our words are certainly consequential. That's why Solomon gives us a warning that we need to pay attention to. In Proverbs 12:23, he says, the prudent
Vicki: keep their knowledge to themselves. But a fool's heart blurts out folly.
Kent: Here Solomon, the wisest man apart from Christ, points out there are two different types of people in the world differentiated by the way that they speak. So let's take a look at these people in reverse order. The last part of verse 23, a
Vicki: fool's heart blurts out folly.
Kent: I found it interesting to do some digging into that word fool and folly. I learned that a fool is someone who stubbornly clings to their own personal opinion. They think they are right about a topic without much consideration, and who have definitely not referenced God's teachings on the subject. Solomon is saying, a fool is someone who ignores the sage's wisdom. They're confident in their distorted moral vision, and they delight in twisting values that benefit themselves, at least in the short run. The fool in biblical terms is one that says, I will determine what's right and wrong and good and bad without any reference to what God or anyone else has to say. We hear a lot of folly today, don't we? People who come up with their own version of right and wrong without referencing God's word.
Nathan: Well, that's part of the current cultural moment in the west anyways, right? Where we have certainly is essentially you make your own personalized morality about everything. Sex and drugs, you know, that's a good example. Like on drugs, I had just a young man in the community who I just got into a whole gospel conversation with him. But he said, well, why is taking drugs bad, Right? And so I kind of went through, you know, health issues and mental states and damaging your body and all this stuff. And he's like, yeah, but that could be okay. So he was starting to come to the conclusion, guess it's okay to take it for a little bit to make you happy, to get you over the hump of life's hardships. Right? And instead of arguing with him directly, I came out. I was like, well, how has that worked out for you right now? Because you're pretty miserable and you needed somebody to talk to. And we're talking right now, right, because the drugs didn't work. But he really had this image that the drugs can get me over the hump. They're going to make me happy. And that was his morality. That's what drugs are good for. And the only reason they're illegal is because if you take them for too long, then there's health issues. Not that now you're out of control. It's an idol. It is a false sense of happiness rather than dealing with the main issues, Right? So here he is just telling a pastor, and he knew I was a pastor. Why? You know, we should try drugs a little bit to get us over the hard times a little bit. And you're laughing because it's foolish.
Kent: It is. Yeah. Sometimes in the news feeds, they'll have someone who says, oh, I decided to have an affair and there's nothing better for my marriage. I think we need to spice things up a bit. And they Just, they made up their own morals and they decide to. To spout it out there.
Vicki: Well, look, we're living right now with the Epstein files. And I mean, these powerful people decided that was a good idea and they ruined lives. Ruined lives of children. Boy, I'm sure it didn't spice up their marriage. It ruined their careers. Hopefully it will ruin more careers if everything comes out as it should. And yeah, that's an example of folly.
Kent: You hear about folly when someone says, oh, those people. I hear business people say, often those people, they just. They're poor because they're lazy. I made my money by pulling up my own bootstraps. And those people, if they only had a mind and a work ethic, they could make something of themselves. I'm under no obligation to help them. That's a. That's a moral judgment that has been made without reference to Scripture. Jesus didn't have a will when he died. He had no money to share with anyone when he died. Was he a failure? Was he lazy? Come on.
Vicki: I'll tell you what. I've had jobs that paid really well, and I've had jobs that didn't. And the jobs that are the hardest are the jobs that did not pay really well. Those are labor jobs, are hard, difficult jobs.
Nathan: Absolutely.
Kent: It's amazing how often we like to make up our own morals, make up our own minds, and whatever feels comfortable for us, we announce it as if it was true. And welcome to the Internet. This is unprecedented opportunity to share foolish information, isn't it?
Nathan: Yeah. And social media encourages you to kind of have these snap judgments and to show your foolishness right up front. Right. Don't think about it. Just start arguing with these strangers on the Internet or some acquaintances that you have and really show that you don't really know anything or say some horrible things that maybe you should have thought. And if you thought for more than 30 seconds, you would have thought, I'm not going to say that out loud.
Kent: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting that God says, when you've got a problem with someone, go to them and talk to them, just between the two of you in a private conversation. We're much more restrained in what we say, careful about what we say to a person face to face. But the anonymity of the Internet, it's easy just to vomit words and have them go out. And the Internet does a good job of taking those words and spreading it everywhere. In fact, they've got algorithms that help feed the information that you have said to people who are open to listening. To it. And there are content creators that get paid to deliberately say stuff just so they get more hits and clicks and they make more money. That's why Solomon says a fool's heart blurts out folly. We're living in a world today as Solomon was filled with fools and they blurt out folly. Wrong information. So how should we respond? How did Solomon begin in the first part of that verse?
Vicki: The way the verse started is he said the prudent keep their knowledge to themselves.
Kent: Hmm. The word prudent literally means shrewd. It's referring to people who conceal their knowledge in the sense that they are not driven by pride to parade what they know. Instead, the prudent or shrewd person has the self control to wait for the right situation and then the wisdom to know when and how to speak up to folly. In other words, we don't have to respond immediately to every stupid thing people say.
Nathan: We need a picture of Kent's face with that quote so that everyone should save it on their smartphones and their computers, so that when someone posts something stupid on your social media, you could just post that as your response. We don't have to respond immediately to every stupid thing people say. Right there.
Kent: Boom. As we're recording this podcast, there's all kinds of things happening in our country and around the world that have caused people to respond with great emotion. And I see people jumping in. I've been quiet for some time, but people need to know what I think on this. No, they don't, actually. Why? Why is arguing with people who believe a falsehood not the best course of action?
Vicki: Well, that gets to that pearls before swine concept. If a person is really. They've made up their mind and they are not open to hearing, they're not open to hearing. And better to just sit back until a time they might be open to hearing.
Nathan: Yeah. And it's, you know, especially like social media, it's not the best place to have those kind of give and pull arguments. Why there is very little. Well, because. Because of the distance between someone. The fact that the. The reality of social media, you distance someone cognitively from you. Yes, you can see a picture of them, but it's easier to say I'm interacting with data rather than I'm interacting with a person, versus if you're having a conversation with them on the phone where there's more intimacy and you're like, okay, I'm talking to a human being here, versus if you're sitting across from them face to face having a difficult conversation. Or a difficult disagreement that you have to talk about. Now you're saying, okay, this is a person. They have feelings, they matter. And we have time for nuance, right? Nuance is such a lost art. So many major issues have nuance to them. But the Internet, social media does allow for nuance. And when you call for nuanced light, and I know this from for a fact, then people just, oh, well, you know, you've. You've gotten rid of the gospel, you know, whatever. You know, they'll accuse you of anything. But nuance matters. And it's hard to do nuance over text messages or particularly over social media, because nuance takes time.
Vicki: And often with people you don't know, that's true too, right, Ducky Bob? 123.
Nathan: Yeah.
Vicki: Yeah.
Kent: No. So a prudent man keeps his knowledge to himself. He doesn't deliberately or directly or instantly engage this person. He waits for a more opportune time when his words can have greater benefit. Why? Because the heart of fools blurts out folly. The problem with people making their own laws and rules and morals is not so much their words, but it's their heart. What they're saying comes from a damaged heart. In fact, I'm reminded of what Jesus says in Luke 6:45.
Nathan: He said, A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart. An evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.
Kent: So what Solomon is pointing to and Jesus is emphasizing is that bad morals, bad advice, comes from a damaged heart. There's something that has wounded them personally inside that is causing them to say what they are saying. So the prudent man keeps his knowledge to himself until he can find a time when he can sit down with a person and deal with the heart issue that is creating the bad moral judgments that he is making.
Nathan: Yeah, it's hard, but it makes sense. I mean, even I think to some extent, pop culture gets this before the Internet. I remember we were at a gift store with my family and my dad saw this bumper sticker and we didn't get it, but he just said, oh, I found my bumper sticker. And it said, being wise isn't hard. Just think of something stupid to say and don't say it. And. And so we saw that. That's always stuck with us. But then in the recent past, the very, very popular show the Office, one character, Dwight Schrute, he says this. He said, whenever I'm about to do something, I think, would an idiot do that? And if they would, I do not do that thing. Right? So we kind of get this, but it's really hard in the heat of the moment to not respond, right? If somebody calls you out to a fist fight, you want to return swings. If somebody sends you an insult, you want to insult them back. There is an incredible amount of pressure right now, not just with social media, but in life in general, where we all have to talk about what political candidate we support and what political ideology we belong to. By the way, it's a secret ballot. You don't have to There is an incredible amount of pressure to, especially on anyone who has any kind of platform, whether it's a pastor or speaker, where everyone wants to know your opinion on everything. If you're talking about immigration, if you're talking about the war in Iran, the war in Israel and Palestine and Gaza, right? There's an incredible amount of pressure to hear your opinion about all of this stuff. And Solomon here is saying you don't have to give it to them. But it's really hard because there's a lot of pressure that I have to have an opinion and I have to post about it and I have to make it public and I have to do a substack or a blog post and let everybody know what I feel about every little thing. Otherwise I am compliant with the evil that's going on in the world today.
Kent: Foolish talk comes from a person who maybe never had a relationship with Christ. Or maybe they did, but a wound in that relationship has caused them to arrive at a false conclusion about the God who loves him. Maybe that person may need a friend to share the gospel with them if they didn't know Christ. Or maybe they need some spiritual assistance to deal with a deep wound that is causing this burst of folly. Either way, the prudent should keep their knowledge to themselves until they can help their colleague, their sister in law, next door neighbor or stranger resolve their inner spiritual issues. Because it's out of the heart that the mouth speaks. The fact is, you don't need to respond to every falsehood you hear online or at the coffee shop or even at the dinner table. Solomon is recommending that we avoid knee jerk reactions to stuff on TikTok, Instagram or Reddit posts. Instead, find ways to get to know the person who has made those comments better, understand why they're saying what they are, and see how you can gently guide them closer to Christ. As the wisest person who ever lived has pointed out, throwing fire on fire will only make matters worse, find the right time and minister to their hurting soul. Think before you speak because the prudent person keeps their knowledge to themselves.
Brian: We all know the temptation to correct foolish opinions. But as we just heard, if we're wise, we will not correct foolish talk because foolish talk comes from a wounded heart. Instead, let's look for ways to help heal wounded hearts, knowing that healed hearts can accept God's wisdom. I trust that today's discussion of God's Word has been helpful and served as an encouragement to not just be hearers of the Word, but doers together. Let's bring God's words, word to life to our lives. This week, the crosstalk Podcast is a production of crosstalk Global equipping biblical communicators so every culture hears God's voice. To find out more about this educational non profit organization, please visit www.crosstalkglobal.org. crosstalk is training leaders in Bucharest, Moldova, Cuba, Kenya and Kansas over the next few weeks help us train the next generation of biblical communicators. All you have to do is click Donate in the show notes and make a donation of any size. You can also support this show by rating it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find it. Be sure to listen next Friday as we continue to learn from God's wisdom in the Book of Proverbs. You won't want to miss it.
Kent: Next week. I am teaching crosstalk so in SoCal, so I'm unavailable.
Nathan: So I. I gave you a few options. What are you comfortable with being Brian's show and you're Brian's proxy. What are you comfortable with? Kent Edwards.
Kent: Yeah,
Vicki: that is so funny to me.
Nathan: It's hilarious.
Vicki: I wish I could moonwalk. I try it, but I'm pathetic at it.
Nathan: Well, I'm sure there's a YouTube video on it.
Vicki: There is, but I can't. I can't.
Nathan: You can't with that attitude, Vicki.
Vicki: No, I know, I know, I know.